CITY HEADS TOWARD PAY EQUITY

James WarrenCHICAGO TRIBUNE

The City of Chicago pays its laboratory assistants, who are all females, $740 a month. But it pays $2,070 a month to street repair workers, who are all males and rated by the city as slightly below the lab workers in skills and responsibility.

That difference helps explain a city decision to settle sex discrimination cases alleging historically low pay for females. It`s the first major settlement of its kind since an appeals court in September overturned an award of $800 million to 15,000 State of Washington workers in the most famous ''comparable worth'' case.

City officials decline to call last week`s settlement, which will mean an extra 5 percent pay increase next July 1 for 3,500 mostly female workers in 79 job titles, an official embrace of the disputed concept of comparable worth, or equal pay for jobs of similar skills and responsibilities.

But Richard Laner, the city`s chief labor negotiator, conceded that wage inequities were clear, even glaring.

''After studying the situation, we felt obligated to reduce the gap between these historically female and minority-dominated jobs and some of the higher paying, male-dominated jobs.''

The city last week announced terms of a new three-year labor contract for 7,500 white-collar workers and settlement of sex-discrimination charges affecting 3,500 from the same group.

Under the tentative contract, pay will rise at least 13.6 percent over three years. Those benefiting from the sex-discrimination settlement can expect their pay to rise at least 19.2 percent. The pay of laboratory assistants, for example, will rise to at least $882 monthly over the three-year period.

Just how much the repairmen`s monthly salary would rise in the same period is under negotiation. It is almost certain, however, that the gap between the lab assistant and repairman will narrow.

''This is an attempt to solve a basic inequity in the pay structure,''

Laner said. ''It`s the treatment of a specific situation that coincidentally happens to involve a lot of women and minorities. We`re not putting our arms around the concept of comparable worth.''

But Gerald McEntee, president of the nation`s largest public employees union, left no doubt Tuesday as to his belief that the Chicago pay equity settlement, which will cost the city about $1.2 million next year, has national implications that go beyond the narrowing of the large female-male wage gap here.

''It is significant in two respects,'' said McEntee, president of the 1 million-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which brought the Washington state lawsuit and whose members include the 3,500 white-collar employees benefiting from the Chicago accord.

''First, it puts the nation`s third largest city on record with AFSCME as attempting to remedy sex-based wage discrimination. Second, this is the first major AFSCME-negotiated pay equity settlement since the Washington court ruling. The new contract is just another demonstration of the continuing nationwide momentum on pay equity.''

According to AFSCME, Chicago and Los Angeles are now alone among large cities in making pay equity adjustments. AFSCME has discrimination charges pending against New York and Philadelphia, while San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein recently vetoed as too costly a pay equity measure passed by the city`s board of supervisors.

The Chicago accord stems from sex discrimination charges filed against the city in 1982. The charges were filed with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which ultimately delayed taking any action as the city and AFSCME sought to bargain an accord.

In alleging discrimination, AFSCME relied heavily on a study of the city`s pay system done by the Chicago consulting firm of Hay Associates for Mayor Jane Byrne`s administration.

Since the 1940s, Hay has been the pioneer in job evaluation studies for employers nationwide. Its system gives points on a variety of criteria, like education, skill levels, experience, responsibility and amount of independent judgment needed, and ranks jobs within a work force.

For its City of Chicago survey, it ranked 600 jobs in a work force of 40,000. Ratings ran from a low of 82 points for an elevator operator to 830 points for the airport operations manager at O`Hare International Airport, according to Roberta Lynch, AFSCME`s public policy director in Illinois.

AFSCME`s claims of sex discrimination largely turn on taking jobs of similar ratings and underlining marked pay differences. In most instances, the lower-paying job title is female-dominated, while the higher-paying one is male-dominated, according to Lynch.

For example, the laboratory assistant was rated at 94 points, while the street repairman was at 92. But the repairman`s entry level wage is now $1,330 a month higher.

A worker in the female-dominated junior clerk title was rated at 98 points, or 10 points higher than the male-dominated storeroom worker title. But the entry-level wage for the clerk is $740 a month, compared with $2,070 for the storeroom worker. That clerk can now expect a pay increase of at least 19.2 percent over three years.

The wholly female title of licensed practical nurse, rated at 192 points, starts at $987 a month. The wholly male, skilled job of cement finisher on street repairs, rated at 185, starts at $2,388.

The female-dominated job of librarian had the same rating, 268, as did the largely-male planner`s job in the Mayor`s Office of Employment and Training. The librarian`s entry wage is $1,451, the planner`s is $1,765. Both groups are represented by AFSCME and their pay will rise 19.2 percent, to $1,730, and 13.6 percent, to $2,005, respectively.

AFSCME broke the Hay ratings into larger groupings. For example, it placed all jobs in the 120 to 159 point range together. It found the average salary in male-dominated jobs to be higher than the female. The highest paying, female-dominated categories were generally not as high as the average male salary within that grouping.

According to AFSCME, 86 percent of the men in the city work force earn more than $20,000 a year, while only 37 percent of the women make that much. Sixteen percent of the women earn less than $13,000, while fewer than 1 percent of the men earn that little.

Of the 3,500 white-collar workers affected by the settlement, most earn less than $15,000. The group is 86 percent female and 58 percent black and, as one city official concedes privately, ''were traditionally ignored as we placed emphasis on the cops, firefighters and unionized building trades.''

The official said the white-collar group was ''generally forgotten''

until it voted to join AFSCME last year.

While the union contends the settlement is a major victory for a snowballing concept of comparable worth, or what it prefers to call pay equity, Laner reflected the criticism voiced of the concept.

''I don`t think that, as a practical matter, the concept can fly because we`re a market-driven economy. When a schoolteacher asks me why she gets $16,000 and Walter Payton gets $600,000, I say that when you can bring 50,000 people into your history class at $10 a head then we`ll pay you that.''